There is a damaging and self-defeating assumption that theory is
necessarily the elite language of the socially and
culturally privileged. It is said that the place of the academic
critic is inevitably within the Eurocentric archives of an
imperialist or neo-colonial West. The Olympian realms of what is
mistakenly labelled 'pure theory' are assumed to
be eternally insulated from the historical exigencies and
tragedies of the wretched of the earth. Must we always
polarize in order to polemicize? Are we trapped in a politics of
struggle where the representation of social
antagonisms and historical contradictions can take no other form
than a binarism, of theory vs politics? Can the aim
of freedom of knowledge be the simple inversion of the relation
of oppressor and oppressed, centre and periphery,
negative image and positive image? Is our only way out of such
dualism the espousal of an implacable
oppositionality or the invention of an originary counter-myth of
radical purity? Must the project of our liberationist
aesthetics be forever part of a totalizing Utopian vision of
Being and History that seeks to transcend the
contradictions and ambivalences that constitute the very
structure of human subjectivity and its systems of cultural
representation?

Between what is represented as the 'larceny' and distortion of
European 'metatheorizing' and the radical, engaged,
activist experience of Third World creativity,' one can see the
mirror image (albeit reversed in content and intention)
of that ahistorical nineteenth-century polarity of Orient and
Occident which, in the name of progress, unleashed the
exclusionary imperialist ideologies of self and other. This time
round, the term 'critical theory', often untheorized
and unargued, is definitely the Other, an otherness that is
insistently identified with the vagaries of the depoliticized
Eurocentric critic. Is the cause of radical art or critique best
served for instance, by a fulminating professor of film
who announces, at a flashpoint in the argument, 'We are not
artists, we are political activists.' By obscuring the
power of his own practice in the
rhetoric of militancy, he fails to draw attention to the specific
value of a politics of cultural production; because it
makes the surfaces of cinematic signification the grounds of
political intervention, it gives depth to the language of
social criticism and extends the domain of 'politics' in a
direction that will not be entirely dominated by the forces of
economic or social control. Forms of popular rebellion and
mobilization are often most subversive and transgressive
when they are created through oppositional cultural practices.

Before I am accused of bourgeois voluntarism, liberal pragmatism,
academicist pluralism and all the other '-isms'
that are freely bandied about by those who take the most severe
exception to 'Eurocentric' theoreticism
(Derrideanism, Lacanianism, poststructuralism ... ), I would like
to clarify the goals of my opening questions. I am
convinced that, in the language of political economy, it is
legitimate to represent the relations of exploitation and
domination in the discursive division between the First and Third
World, the North and the South. Despite the
claims to a spurious rhetoric of 'internationalism' on the part
of the established multinationals and the networks of
the new communications technology industries, such circulations
of signs and commodities as there are, are caught
in the vicious circuits of surplus value that link First World
capital to Third World labour markets through the
chains of the international division of labour, and national
comprador classes. Gayatri Spivak is right to conclude
that it is 'in the interest of capital to preserve the comprador
theatre in a state of relatively primitive labour
legislation and environmental regulation'

I am equally convinced that, in the language of international
diplomacy, there is a sharp growth in a new Anglo-
American nationalism which increasingly articulates its economic
and military power in political acts that express a
neo-imperialist disregard for the independence and autonomy of
peoples and places in the Third World. Think of
America's 'backyard' policy towards the Caribbean and Latin
America, the patriotic gore and patrician lore of
Britain's Falklands Campaign or, more recently, the triumphalism
of the American and British forces during the
Gulf War. I am further convinced that such economic and political
domination has a profound hegemonic influence
on the information orders of the Western world, its popular media
and its specialized institutions and academics. So
much is not in doubt.

What does demand further discussion is whether the 'new'
languages of theoretical critique (semiotic,
poststructuralist, deconstructionist and the rest) simply reflect
those geopolitical divisions and their spheres of
influence. Are the interests of 'Western' theory necessarily
collusive with the hegemonic role of the West as a power
bloc? Is the language of theory merely another power ploy of the
culturally privileged Western elite to produce a discourse of the Other that reinforces its own power-knowledge equation?

A large film festival in the West - even an alternative or
counter-cultural event such as Edinburgh's 'Third Cinema'
Conference - never fails to reveal the disproportionate influence
of the West as cultural forum, in all three senses of
that word: as place of public exhibition and discussion, as place
of judgement, and as market-place. An Indian film
about the plight of Bombay's pavement-dwellers wins the Newcastle
Festival which then opens up distribution
facilities in India. The first searing exposé of the Bhopal
disaster is made for Channel Four. A major debate on the
politics and theory of Third Cinema first appears in Screen,
published by the British Film Institute. An archival
article on the important history of neo-traditionalism and the
'popular' in Indian cinema sees the light of day in
Framework. Among the major contributors to the development of
the Third Cinema as precept and practice are a
number of Third World film-makers and critics who are exiles or
émigrés in the West and live problematically, often
dangerously, on the 'left' margins of a Eurocentric, bourgeois
liberal culture. I don't think I need to add individual
names or places, or detail the historical reasons why the West
carries and exploits what Bourdieu would call its
symbolic capital. The condition is all too familiar, and it is
not my purpose here to make those important
distinctions between different national situations and the
disparate political causes and collective histories of cultural
exile. I want to take my stand on the shifting margins of
cultural displacement - that confounds any profound or
'authentic' sense of a 'national' culture or an 'organic'
intellectual - and ask what the function of a committed
theoretical perspective might be, once the cultural and
historical hybridity of the postcolonial world is taken as the
paradigmatic place of departure.

Committed to what? At this stage in the argument, I do not want
to identify any specific 'object' of political
allegiance - the Third World, the working class, the feminist
struggle. Although such an objectification of political
activity is crucial and must significantly inform political
debate, it is not the only option for those critics or
intellectuals who are committed to progressive political change
in the direction of a socialist society. It is a sign of
political maturity to accept that there are many forms of
political writing whose different effects are obscured when
they are divided between the 'theoretical' and the 'activist'. It
is not as if the leaflet involved in the organization of a
strike is short on theory, while a speculative article on the
theory of ideology ought to have more practical
examples or applications. They are both forms of discourse and to
that extent they produce rather than reflect their
objects of reference. The difference between them is in their
operational qualities. The leaflet has a specific
expository and organizational purpose,
temporally bound to the event; the theory of ideology makes its
contribution to those embedded political ideas and
principles that inform the right to strike. The latter does not
justify the former; nor does it necessarily precede it. It
exists side by side with it - the one as an enabling part of the
other - like the recto and verso of a sheet of paper, to
use a common semiotic analogy in the uncommon context of
politics.

My concern here is with the process of 'intervening
ideologically', as Stuart Hall describes the role of 'imagining'
or representation in the practice of politics in his response to
the British election of 1987. For Hall, the notion of
hegemony implies a politics of identification of the imaginary.
This occupies a discursive space which is not
exclusively delimited by the history of either the right or the
left. It exists somehow in-between these political
polarities, and also between the familiar divisions of theory and
political practice. This approach, as I read it,
introduces us to an exciting, neglected moment, or movement, in
the 'recognition' of the relation of politics to
theory; and confounds the traditional division between them. Such
a movement is initiated if we see that relation as
determined by the rule of repeatable materiality, which Foucault
describes as the process by which statements from
one institution can be transcribed in the discourse of another.'
Despite the schemata of use and application that
constitute a field of stabilization for the statement, any change
in the statement's conditions of use and reinvestment,
any alteration in its field of experience or verification, or
indeed any difference in the problems to be solved, can lead
to the emergence of a new statement: the difference of the same.

In what hybrid forms, then, may a politics of the theoretical
statement emerge? What tensions and ambivalences
mark this engimatic place from which theory speaks? Speaking in
the name of some counterauthority or horizon of
'the true' (in Foucault's sense of the strategic effects of any
apparatus or dispositif) the theoretical enterprise has to
represent the adversarial authority (of power and/or knowledge)
which, in a doubly inscribed move, it simultaneously
seeks to subvert and replace. In this complicated formulation I
have tried to indicate something of the boundary and
location of the event of theoretical critique which does not
contain the truth (in polar opposition to totalitarianism,
'bourgeois liberalism' or whatever is supposed to repress it).
The 'true' is always marked and informed by the
ambivalence of the process of emergence itself, the productivity
of meanings that construct counter-knowledges in
medias res, in the very act of agonism, within the terms of a
negotiation (rather than a negation) of oppositional and
antagonistic elements. Political positions are not simply
identifiable as progressive or reactionary, bourgeois or
radical, prior to the act of critique engagée, or outside the
terms and conditions of their discursive address. It is in
this sense that the historical moment of political action must be
thought of as part of the history of the form of its writing. This is not
to state the obvious, that there is no knowledge -
political or otherwise - outside representation. It is to suggest
that the dynamics of writing and textuality require us
to rethink the logics of causality and determinacy through which
we recognize the 'political' as a form of calculation
and strategic action dedicated to social transformation.

'What is to be done?' must acknowledge the force of writing, its
metaphoricity and its rhetorical discourse, as a
productive matrix which defines the 'social' and makes it
available as an objective of and for, action. Textuality is
not simply a second-order ideological expression or a verbal
symptom of a pre-given political subject. That the
political subject - as indeed the subject of politics - is a
discursive event is nowhere more clearly seen than in a text
which has been a formative influence on Western democratic and
socialist discourse - Min's essay 'On Liberty'. His
crucial chapter, 'On The Liberty of Thought and Discussion', is
an attempt to define political judgement as the
problem of finding a form of public rhetoric able to represent
different and opposing political 'contents' not as a
priori preconstituted principles but as a dialogical discursive
exchange; a negotiation of terms in the on-going
present of the enunciation of the political statement. What is
unexpected is the suggestion that a crisis of
identification is initiated in the textual performance that
displays a certain 'difference' within the signification of any
single political system, prior to establishing the substantial
differences between political beliefs. A knowledge can
only become political through an agnostic process: dissensus,
alterity and otherness are the discursive conditions for
the circulation and recognition of a politicized subject and a
public 'truth':

[If] opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is
indispensable to imagine them.... [He] must feel the whole
force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to
encounter and dispose of; else he will never really
possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes
that difficulty... Their conclusion may be true, but
it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown
themselves into the mental position of those who
think differently from them ... and consequently they do not, in
any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine
which they themselves profess. (My emphases)

It is true that Mill's 'rationality' permits, or requires, such
forms of contention and contradiction in order to enhance
his vision of the inherently progressive and evolutionary bent of
human judgement. (This makes it possible for
contradictions to be resolved and also generates a sense of the
'whole truth' which reflects the natural, organic bent of
the human mind.) It is also true that Mill always reserves, in
society as in his argument, the unreal neutral space of the Third Person as
the representative of the 'people', who witnesses the
debate from an 'epistemological distance' and draws a reasonable
conclusion. Even so, in his attempt to describe the
political as a form of debate and dialogue - as the process of
public rhetoric - that is crucially mediated through this
ambivalent and antagonistic faculty of a political 'imagination',
Mill exceeds the usual mimetic sense of the battle
of ideas. He suggests something much more dialogical: the
realization of the political idea at the ambivalent point
of textual address, its emergence through a form of political
projection.

Rereading Mill through the strategies of 'writing' that I have
suggested, reveals that one cannot passively follow
the line of argument running through the logic of the opposing
ideology. The textual process of political
antagonism initiates a contradictory process of reading between
the lines; the agent of the discourse becomes, in the
same time of utterance, the inverted, projected object of the
argument, turned against itself. It is, Mill insists, only
by effectively assuming the mental position of the antagonist and
working through the displacing and decentring
force of that discursive difficulty that the politicized 'portion
of truth' is produced. This is a different dynamic from
the ethic of tolerance in liberal ideology which has to imagine
opposition in order to contain it and demonstrate its
enlightened relativism or humanism. Reading Mill, against the
grain, suggests that politics can only become
representative, a truly public discourse, through a splitting in
the signification of the subject of representation;
through an ambivalence at the point of the enunciation of a
politics.

I have chosen to demonstrate the importance of the space of
writing, and the problematic of address, at the very
heart of the liberal tradition because it is here that the myth
of the 'transparency' of the human agent and the
reasonableness of political action is most forcefully asserted.
Despite the more radical political alternatives of the
right and the left, the popular, common-sense view of the place
of the individual in relation to the social is still
substantially thought and lived in ethical terms moulded by
liberal beliefs. What the attention to rhetoric and writing
reveals is the discursive ambivalence that makes 'the political'
possible. From such a perspective, the problematic of
political judgement cannot be represented as an epistemological
problem of appearance and reality or theory and
practice or word and thing. Nor can it be represented as a
dialectical problem or a symptomatic contradiction
constitutive of the materiality of the 'real'. On the contrary,
we are made excruciatingly aware of the ambivalent
juxtaposition, the dangerous interstitial relation of the factual
and the projective, and, beyond that, of the crucial
function of the textual and the rhetorical. It is those
vicissitudes of the movement of the signifier, in the fixing of
the factual and the closure of the real, that ensure the efficacy of stategic
thinking in the discourses of Realpolitik. It is this
to-and-fro, this fort/da of the symbolic process of political
negotiation, that constitutes a politics of address. Its
importance goes beyond the unsettling of the essentialism or
logocentricism of a received political tradition, in the
name of an abstract free play of the signifier.

A critical discourse does not yield a new political object, or
aim, or knowledge, which is simply a mimetic
reflection of an a priori political principle or theoretical
commitment. We should not demand of it a pure teleology
of analysis whereby the prior principle is simply augmented, its
rationality smoothly developed, its identity as
socialist or materialist (as opposed to neo-imperialist or
humanist) consistently confirmed in each oppositional stage
of the argument. Such identikit political idealism may be the
gesture of great individual fervour, but it lacks the
deeper, if dangerous, sense of what is entailed by the passage of
history in theoretical discourse. The language of
critique is effective not because it keeps forever separate the
terms of the master and the slave, the mercantilist and
the Marxist, but to the extent to which it overcomes the given
grounds of opposition and opens up a space of
translation: a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where
the construction of a political object that is new,
neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political
expectations, and changes, as it must, the very forms
of our recognition of the moment of politics. The challenge lies
in conceiving of the time of political action and
understanding as opening up a space that can accept and regulate
the differential structure of the moment of
intervention without rushing to produce a unity of the social
antagonism or contradiction. This is a sign that history
is happening - within the pages of theory, within the systems and
structures we construct to figure the passage of
the historical.

When I talk of negotiation rather than negation, it is to convey
a temporality that makes it possible to conceive
of the articulation of antagonistic or contradictory elements: a
dialectic without the emergence of a teleological or
transcendent History, and beyond the prescriptive form of
symptomatic reading where the nervous tics on the surface
of ideology reveal the 'real materialist contradiction' that
History embodies. In such a discursive temporality, the
event of theory becomes the negotiation of contradictory and
antagonistic instances that open up hybrid sites and
objectives of struggle, and destroy those negative polarities
between knowledge and its objects, and between theory
and practical-political reason. If I have argued against a
primordial and previsionary division of right or left,
progressive or reactionary, it has been Only to stress the fully
historical and discursive diffiérance between them. I
would not like my notion of negotiation to be confused with some
syndicalist sense of reformism because that is
not the political level that is being explored here. By negotiation I attempt to draw
attention to the structure of iteration which informs
political movements that attempt to articulate antagonistic and
oppositional elements without the redemptive
rationality of sublation or transcendence.

The temporality of negotiation or translation, as I have sketched
it, has two main advantages. First, it
acknowledges the historical connectedness between the subject and
object of critique so that there can be no
simplistic, essentialist opposition between ideological
miscognition and revolutionary truth. The progressive
reading is crucially determined by the adversarial or agonistic
situation itself; it is effective because it uses the
subversive, messy mask of camouflage and does not come like a
pure avenging angel speaking the truth of a radical
historicity and pure oppositionality. If one is aware of this
heterogeneous emergence (not origin) of radical critique,
then - and this is my second point - the function of theory
within the political process becomes double-edged. It
makes us aware that our political referents and priorities - the
people, the community, class struggle, anti-racism,
gender difference, the assertion of an anti-imperialist, black or
third perspective - are not there in some primordial,
naturalistic sense. Nor do they reflect a unitary or homogeneous
political object. They make sense as they come to
be constructed in the discourses of feminism or Marxism or the
Third Cinema or whatever, whose objects of priority
- class or sexuality or 'the new ethnicity' - are always in
historical and philosophical tension, or cross-reference with
other objectives.

Indeed, the whole history of socialist thought which seeks to
'make it new and better' seems to be a different
process of articulating priorities whose political objects can be
recalcitrant and contradictory. Within contemporary
Marxism, for example, witness the continual tension between the
English, humanist, labourist faction and the
'theoreticist', structuralist, new left tendencies. Within
feminism, there is again a marked difference of emphasis
between the psychoanalytic/semiotic tradition and the Marxist
articulation of gender and class through a theory of
cultural and ideological interpellation. I have presented these
differences in broad brush-strokes, often using the
language of polemic, to suggest that each position is always a
process of translation and transference of meaning.
Each objective is constructed on the trace of that perspective
that it puts under erasure; each political object is
determined in relation to the other, and displaced in that
critical act. Too often these theoretical issues are
peremptorily transposed into organizational terms and represented
as sectarianism. I am suggesting that such
contradictions and conflicts, which often thwart political
intentions and make the question of commitment complex
and difficult, are rooted in the process of translation and
displacement in which the object of politics is inscribed.
The effect is not stasis or a sapping of the will. It is, on the contrary, the spur of the negotiation of socialist
democratic politics and policies which demand that questions
of organization are theorized and socialist theory is
'organized', because there is no given community or body of the
people whose inherent, radical historicity emits the right signs.

This emphasis on the representation of the political, on the
construction of discourse, is the radical contribution
of the translation of theory. Its conceptual vigilance never
allows a simple identity between the political objective
and its means of representation. This emphasis on the necessity
of heterogeneity and the double inscription of the
political objective is not merely the repetition of a general
truth about discourse introduced into the political field.
Denying an essentialist logic and a mimetic referent to political
representation is a strong, principled argument
against political separatism of any colour, and cuts through the
moralism that usually accompanies such claims.
There is literally, and figuratively, no space for the unitary or
organic political objective which would offend against
the sense of a socialist community of interest and articulation.

In Britain, in the 1980s, no political struggle was fought more
powerfully, and sustained more poignantly, on the
values and traditions of a socialist community than the miners'
strike of 1984--5. The battalions of monetarist
figures and forecasts on the profitability of the pits were
starkly ranged against the most illustrious standards of the
British labour movement, the most cohesive cultural communities
of the working class. The choice was clearly
between the dawning world of the new Thatcherite city gent and a
long history of the working man, or so it seemed
to the traditional left and the new right. In these class terms
the mining women involved in the strike were
applauded for the heroic supporting role they played, for their
endurance and initiative. But the revolutionary
impulse, it seemed, belonged securely to the working-class male.
Then, to commemorate the first anniversary of the
strike, Beatrix Campbell, in the Guardian, interviewed a group of
women who had been involved in the strike. It
was clear that their experience of the historical struggle, their
understanding of the historic choice to be made, was
startlingly different and more complex. Their testimonies would
not be contained simply or singly within the
priorities of the politics of class or the histories of
industrial struggle. Many of the women began to question their
roles within the family and the community - the two central
institutions which articulated the meanings and mores
of the tradition of the labouring classes around which
ideological battle was enjoined. Some challenged the symbols
and authorities of the culture they fought to defend. Others
disrupted the homes they had struggled to sustain. For
most of them there was no return, no going back to the 'good old
days'. It would be simplistic to suggest either that
this considerable social change was a spin-off from the class
struggle or that it was a repudiation of the politics of class from a
socialist-feminist perspective. There is no simple political or social truth to be learned, for there is no unitary representation of a political agency, no fixed hierarchy or political values and effects.

My illustration attempts to display the importance of the hybrid moment of political change. Here the transformational value of change lies in the rearticulation, or translation, of elements that are neither the One (unitary working class) nor the Other (the politics of gender) but something else besides, which contests the terms and territories of both. [...]